Hey there! Austin here.

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

My team’s been pushing me to launch a newsletter. And now they can be happy 🙂 

LinkedIn content has been powerful for us—and it was about time to start publishing some more long-form pieces.

But you can only go so deep on social.

So here we are!

In the first edition, I want to walk you through how we’ve thought about building the growth team at Unify. We consistently punch above our weight as a Series A company—and I think there are a few learnings that will be helpful for you.

I’ll walk through 3 of them in this essay.

Let’s dive in.

📒 GTM PLAYBOOK

How to build a winning Growth team

3 uncommon traits that allowed Unify’s Growth team to book 494 meetings in October

Unify is a 22-person Series A company, and we've scheduled nearly 500 intro calls this month.

How?

The way we operate our growth team lets us operate like a team 10 times our size.

From what I’ve seen, there are 3 core attributes that set a strong foundation for a winning growth team.

1) Failure & learnings are celebrated

2) Strong accountability on goals and execution

3) Maximize velocity without compromising on quality

Today I want to walk through each of these in more depth, so you know what to look for when you're building your Growth team.

1) Failures and learnings are celebrated

The best growth teams are full of people who aren't scared to experiment, fail, and try again.

We fail all the time. For example, we spent $84k on ads this month (YIKES).

Our CAC was bad.

Some teams would have stopped there.

But we took this aggressive approach intentionally to learn more quickly.

We quickly learned how to optimize ad performance. It took some testing, but now we have a pacing to drive 50+ demos per month—and it’s CAC efficient.

We wouldn’t have gotten there had we been too nervous to test or swing big.

Founders have to foster this culture of learning where its okay to fail. It's borderline impossible to succeed in growth otherwise.

↩️ Reply to this and let me know if you’d want to see a breakdown of our ads strategy.

2) Strong accountability on goals and execution

Every channel has an owner next to the pipeline goal.

At Unify, Rhea owns inbound and paid. Garrett owns automated outbound and partnerships.

One channel. One person.

Why?

When you hold a bag, it changes your behavior and motivates you to execute differently. It's necessary to scale top of funnel.

Every week the team names their top 3-5 priorities in the order of importance. We expect each other to get those top 3 done.

We track the results of experiments in Airtable and score them with the value we thought they'd bring and the value they actually delivered.

Growth teams must be truth-seeking and first principles thinkers.

↩️ Reply and let me know if you want to see the Airtable. Might make it into a template.

3) Maximize velocity without compromising on quality

This is where the best growth teams shine.

They have strong judgement on when to cut corners and when to spend a few extra hours. They understand when a hypothesis has been thoroughly tested and when it hasn't.

There’s a certain level of taste necessary for this.

How does this look for our team?

Our growth team aims to ship 3-5 experiments per person, per week. That's 200 experiments per person per year to learn from if you execute well.

A CSV is often faster than a script. Sometimes using an Upwork contractor in the background is better than a CSV. You hone your judgement on these tradeoffs over time.

You can’t spend weeks agonizing over every experiment. But on the flip side…you can’t just churn out low-quality work.

There’s a sweet spot. The best growth teams have the judgement to know where that is.

To wrap up, if your Growth team can nail these 3 things:

• Eliminate the fear of ‘failure’

• Hold themselves ultra-accountable

• Move with urgency without compromising quality

…you’ve got the winning formula for a 10x growth team.

Hope this helps 🙌

BEFORE YOU GO…

My goal is to make this newsletter the definitive resource for Growth and GTM teams at early and growth-stage startups.

So I have two asks.

1/ Let me know what you thought of this piece. Anything I could have done better?

2/ Reply with topics you’d want to see me cover in future editions.

Thanks for reading this first one.

Chat soon,

Austin